Tenerife firefighters managed, during the night from Saturday to Sunday, to protect houses against the fire which is raging on this tourist island in the Spanish archipelago of the Canaries, announced the regional authorities.
The fire, which broke out on Tuesday evening in a mountainous region in the northeast of the island, has already devoured 8,400 hectares over a perimeter of 70 km, or more than 4% of the area of ??the island, and forced more than 12,000 people to flee. It has become the largest known to the archipelago located off the west coast of Africa.
Despite forecasts of a difficult night with wind and rising temperatures, things went “much better than expected”, the president of the Canary Islands regional government, Fernando Clavijo, said on Sunday morning.
“It is true that the night started very difficult with many calls saying that the fire was very close to the houses,” he told reporters.
But the firefighters “worked very intensively” and managed not to lose any houses in the blaze, he added, which is “almost a miracle”.
Friday evening, Mr. Clavijo had indicated that the firefighting operations had “progressed well even if the fire remains uncontrollable”.
Montserrat Román, head of the archipelago’s civil protection department, confirmed on Sunday that “there have been no more evacuations or confinements”.
The day before, she had specified that 19 air units would join the fight against the blaze on Sunday, warning that it risked becoming complicated due to temperatures and “strong gusts of wind”.
The number of evacuations had been reduced by Mr. Clavijo on Saturday evening, to 12,279 people according to police figures. Earlier in the day, the emergency services had announced more than 26,000 evacuations based on census figures in the affected areas.
The fire has so far affected 11 municipalities in Tenerife, the largest of the seven Canary Islands with 203,400 hectares.
According to the emergency services, the air quality is affected in most of the island “due to the smoke generated by the fire”.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is expected on the island on Monday.
In 2022, 300,000 hectares were destroyed by more than 500 fires in Spain, a record in Europe, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis). Nearly 76,000 hectares have already burned in 2023 in this country, on the front line in the face of global warming.
Since the start of the current year, Spain has recorded 340 fires which have ravaged nearly 76,000 hectares, according to figures from Effis.
20/08/2023 16:49:33 – La Orotava (Spain) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
